The CDC Made America's Pandemic Worse

The pandemic was a test of America's public health bureaucracy. It failed.

Those failures were legion, and they were spread across multiple officials, agencies, and layers of government. But no institution failed quite as abysmally as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, through a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and astonishingly poor planning, wasted America's only chance to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 before it spread widely.

The CDC is supposed to be America's frontline institution in the fight against infectious disease. Its job is to analyze viral...